Software Engineering Institute

May 22, 2014—The Software Engineering Institute (SEI), in collaboration with IEEE Software magazine, hosted its tenth annual SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Conferencethis year in Portland, Oregon from May 5 through May 9. The conference attracts attendees from around the world to share ideas, insights, and experiences about effective architecture-centric practices for developing and maintaining software-intensive systems.

This year's near record-setting attendance comprised software developers, software architects, managers, directors, and others from 20 countries and 111 organizations. The participants represented software development solutions providers, electronics, healthcare, finance, defense, and other related industries.

"Conference attendees were enthusiastic about the broad scope of this year's technical program," said the SEI's Bill Pollak, general chair for SATURN 2014.The program of one- and two-day courses, workshops, experience reports, participatory sessions, and discussion panels included the debut of a new one-day course: Big Data—Architecture and Technologies.

The range of topics addressed at this year's conference included the following:

• customer collaboration
• growing great architects
• the business of software architecture
• the art and science of scalability
• building a community of practice
• DevOps and delivery
• team collaboration
• promoting quality attributes: lessons from the trenches
• architecting in the enterprise

Complementing the technical program, Joe Justice of Scrum Inc. and Team Wikispeed provided the keynote address For Maximum Awesome, which explored how Wikispeed's 100-MPG car was built in three months through object-oriented design and Agile project management. Also keynoting were Jerome Pesenti, vice president of Watson Core Technology at IBM, who presented "Cognitive Computing: New Ways of Developing Software for a New Era of Computing";Bill Opdyke, architecture lead (Corporate Internet Group) at J.P. Morgan Chase, who discussed "Refactoring, Reuse, and Reality—Revisited";and Dianne Marsh, a director of engineering for Netflix, whose address explored Engineering Velocity: Continuous Delivery at Netflix.

"We're pleased to have had such a strong cast of keynote speakers," said Pollak, "Their talks powerfully demonstrated the ways in which concepts discussed at SATURN provide value in real-world contexts."

Continuing a practice that began in 2010, SATURN presented two awards for outstanding presentations determined by attendee vote. The IEEE Software SATURN Architecture in Practice Presentation Award is given to the presentation that best describes experiences, methods, and lessons learned from the implementation of architecture-centric practices. This year's award winners were Will Chaparro and Michael Keeling of IBM for their presentation Facilitating the Mini-Quality Attributes Workshop.The second award, the IEEE Software SATURN New Directions Presentation Award, is given to the presentation that best describes innovative new approaches and thought leadership in the application of architecture-centric practices. This year's award winners Rick Kazman of the SEI, Jungyoo Rwoo of Pennsylvania State University, and Humberto Cervantes of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana–Iztapalapa for their presentation titled Approaching Security from an "Architecture First" Perspective.

"I learned a lot and was impressed by the diverse attendance and excellent briefings," said SEI Director and CEO Paul Nielsen. "SATURN has come a long way since that first meeting in 2005."

For more information about SATURN 2014, and to download conference presentations, please visit the SATURN 2014 website. SATURN 2015 will be held in Baltimore, Maryland, April 27 through 30, 2015.